Episode 44: Painting 11 – Photo-Realism and Conceptual Art

Painting in the Seventies

The 1970s presided over the widely publicized “end of painting.” What the phrase really means is the Modernist painting came to an end. One one hand, the object itself disappeared, swallowed up into Conceptual Art. On the other hand, a movement in painting, still marginalized, Photo-Realism revived painting in all its technical glory and added a touch of the taboo — photography. Following the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, Conceptual Art can be seen as either the ultimate expression of the purity of Modernism or the extinction of the “objecthood,” but it is important to understand that Photo-Realism is an early expression of “conceptual painting.”